[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Yes, you are good and know a lot of the gotchas when it comes to having to try to please people while trying not to bow-down to silly requests.

I wonder what some of your clients would say if I took their eBook and formatted it the way I like without all of this farting about and silly formatting.

I suspect they might complain. ;-) But let's not forget, Jon--you always feel that "your" way is the "right" way, and it's the right way for YOU. Not necessarily for them. (I know that you said, downpost, that you know that your way isn't the only way, and I congratulate you on that!)

Have you seen some of the eBooks I've posted on MR?

Yup, nice clean code. :-)

Thing is, programs like Moon Reader that basically override mot things, if the paragraph indent is set to off, then that's a user error and one that is easily fixed by just changing the setting. So if that's the reason for paragraph spaces, then I would not put them in. There are some programs such as Marvin that can set paragraph spaces. But ADE cannot do this. ADE (the most used program for reading ePub) cannot do a lot of things so that has to be taken into account. What I really dislike a lot are program for reading ePub that override just about everything and never once fully respect the CSS. It's find to have the overrides, but if the overrides are set to off, then that should mean to respect the CSS. And some programs have no clue what they are doing when they override indents. AN indent of 0 has a meaning and should be respected when there are indents.

Agreed, but as you know, not all do. But I would disagree with you that "most" people use ADE. I don't think that's right. I mean...I don't have another candidate, but I just don't think most people read on desktops, compared to smartphones, dedicated devices, etc. I think that's an assumption on your part, Jon.

I know what I like is not what everyone would like and I get that. But the silly space used is just silly. I was cleaning up the formatting of an eBook yesterday and the top margin for the paragraph title was 20%.

20% of...? You mean, a 2em top margin, or...?

Here is the CSS code for the chapter title in another eBook that's just bad form. There's too much in it then there needs to be and 10em looks awful as a top margin.

Yeah, that 10em top margin is a bit much. :-) I can feel a client's hand in that!

But I've seen some pretty poor fake BQ formatting. A real BQ would have not had such bad formatting.

I've seen formatting with left/right margins at 5%. Or with no right margin. That's just going to look awful in both cases. The default values for a BQ would have worked much better.

Yes, but, when was it formatted? Don't forget, for a few years there, back in 2010-11 and so forth, we couldn't DO blockquotes with right-margin indents in MOBI. You always have to look at the year/timeframe that the book was made, Jon.

What I might do is turn off widow and orphans and then let the client have a look and see what he/she thinks. I would not say what I did. If that person then said he/she didn't like then it would be a matter of going from there. But at least you'd have the version with no windows/orphans and all you can say is which do you like better as these are your two choices.

As for the person who wanted the I removed, I would have shown that person a few paragraphs with the I at the end of a line and changed the font size so that wasn't there.

I'm of the show them the correct way to do things and see what they think before showing them what they want. Because if you do it the correct way, the code will be neat enough to then attempt to do it their way. And you can then show a comparison of the two and point out why their way doesn't work.

The "problem" with that is, it's a lot of bookmaker time, showing EVERY client EVERY permutation of what they're asking. Really, for what we charge, I can't afford that, and in the timeframes that 99% of our clients want their books, I can't have bookmaker X take that much time to make 3 versions of the book, one with squaring, one without, one with widows one without...that's not an insignificant amount of time. And this conversation NEVER comes up when we're doing their sample layouts...nooooo. It always rears its head later, when the entire damn book is done. It's a bit tiring.

I did want and thank you for giving.

lol, thanks. Not like I need an invite to spew a bit.

Hitch